About

At the Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University, Amanda serves as one of the senior academic staff in charge of planning, coordinating and executing center programs and research projects. Prior to joining the Rock Center, Amanda served as the executive director of the Stanford Center on the Legal Profession, where she conducted research on diversity on corporate boards, ethics in nonprofits, leadership and the changing dynamics of the legal profession.

She recently co-authored a text specifically designed for teaching leadership in law schools (Deborah L. Rhode & Amanda K. Packel, Leadership: Law, Policy, and Management, Aspen, 2011). Amanda joined Stanford Law School in 2008 after practicing white-collar criminal defense and conducting corporate investigations as an associate at Covington & Burling and at Orrick. Her experience includes defending individuals and companies against SEC enforcement actions and federal criminal investigations in the areas of antitrust, securities fraud, stock options backdating, public corruption and off-label promotion. She also represented audit committees and conducted internal investigations into allegations including securities fraud, the Bank Bribery Act and the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Prior to law school, Amanda did empirical research and analysis in the economic studies program at the Brookings Institution. She received her BA in economics, magna cum laude, from Princeton University and a JD, order of the coif, from the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, where she was an articles editor of the California Law Review. After graduating from law school, Amanda served as a law clerk to Judge Marsha S. Berzon of the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.